Some Thoughts on High School and Columbine

Two days, right in a row, mark anniversaries of tragedies. Yesterday, OKC Bombing. Today, Columbine...

High school sucked. Period. It sucked for almost everyone. Even the popular crowd, the jocks, the hipsters, the artists, it didn't matter: Everybody battled their own demons in those days, just as they battle them now.

Only back then, demons weren't insurance bills or car payments or rent. Demons were other people. But the most powerful ones were our own insecurities, which are far bigger, meaner, and more crippling than any one person can be.

Back then, a stain on a new T-shirt could literally ruin the day. Kids took every opportunityevery single slight opportunityto belittle someone else. That's just the nature and dynamics of that adolescent-filled world, where insecurity is the biggest problem for pretty much everybody.

High school was, by most accounts, an altogether ... complicated ... experience.

In reality, we had very little to complain about. But high school isn't reality. It's an entirely different world, with different rules and different groups, while everyone's focus is to try not to be different. Try to fit in. Try to be accepted. And it was very, very hard.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, protagonists of the Columbine massacre, didn't feel accepted. Dylan, at least, was picked on, despised, exiled, and ignored for no reason other than being different.

Dave Cullen, one of the first reporters on the Columbine scene and author of Columbine, spent 10 years pouring over roughly 25,000 pages of evidence to try to untangle the myths surrounding the shootingmost notably that the kids targeted certain groups (they didn't) or that they were in the Trench Coat Mafia (they weren't) and a variety of other media-propelled rumors that kept the truth from seeping through.

According to the book, Eric Harris left journals behind touting his superiority and how everyone else should die. Dylan Klebold was almost the opposite: constantly feeling insecure, isolated, and lonely. But he, too, felt everyone should die for making him feel that way.

I was a bit like Dylan. (Don't get me wrong, there's absolutely no way I could ever bring myself to do something so horrific). We both detested high school because we didn't feel accepted. We felt a bit lonely and isolated. But almost everyone did. We were entrenched there, both physically and mentally, and that world was all we knew.

I just wish somebody had sat us down and said, High school ends.

That thought never crossed my mind while I was there. Even while researching colleges, I still worried about choosing the correct clothes for the next day and wondered if a certain girl would say "hi" to me (and oh, my God, if she didn't, the entire month was a disaster).

Because high school was my world, I figured it would always be my world.

I thought life after high school would be the same, but in actuality, the rest of the world is nothing like high school (even though a common phrase is high school never ends). I walked around there with tunnel vision. All my thoughts and obsessions and contemplations revolved around classroom settings and the cafeteria. That's an awfully small world, and one that was extremely hard to escape.

But most of us do escape. In college, the big things in high school -- cliques, obsessions over proper attire, trivial fights with parents over cars -- barely matter anymore. People become much more accepting. They more-or-less have to, because they must live with all kinds of people from different ethnic, financial, and societal backgrounds.

The world changes drastically in the years following high school graduation. And moreso after college. But the point is everything changes, and everything ends.

The kids at Columbine chose to end their and other high school lives too early. But I think it's because they thought high school dynamics wouldn't end unless they forced them to. Maybe Dylan thought he'd always be alone and unhappy; maybe Eric thought he'd always be supererior and no one could ever rival him.

What's even more striking is that they were on the verge of graduating, getting out, never seeing that place again, never dealing with the people who made them miserable, not being constricted by those walls...

But here's how stuck they were in high school: Even on the verge of graduating, all they could think about was how much they hated Columbine.

Did anyone simply sit them down and say, This crap ends. This crap absolutely ends. What you're going through, and went through for the past four years, ends, and you'll never have to deal with it again.

It's too bad those boys didn't take the time to find out those words are true.